A central challenge in neuroscience is how the brain organizes the information necessary to orchestrate behaviour. Arguably, this whole-brain orchestration is carried out by a core subset of integrative brain regions, a ‘global workspace’, but its constitutive regions remain unclear. We quantified the global workspace as the common regions across seven tasks as well as rest, in a common ‘functional rich club’. To identify this functional rich club, we determined the information flow between brain regions by means of a normalized directed transfer entropy framework applied to multimodal neuroimaging data from 1,003 healthy participants and validated in participants with retest data. This revealed a set of regions orchestrating information from perceptual, long-term memory, evaluative and attentional systems. We confirmed the causal significance and robustness of our results by systematically lesioning a generative whole-brain model. Overall, this framework describes a complex choreography of the functional hierarchical organization of the human brain.

神经科学的一个核心挑战是大脑如何组织协调行为所需的信息。可以说，这种全脑编排是由整合大脑区域的核心子集（“全局工作空间”）执行的，但其组成区域仍不清楚。我们将全球工作空间量化为一个共同的“功能丰富的俱乐部”中跨七项任务和休息的公共区域。为了识别这个功能丰富的俱乐部，我们通过标准化定向转移熵框架来确定大脑区域之间的信息流，该框架应用于来自 1,003 名健康参与者的多模态神经影像数据，并在具有重新测试数据的参与者中进行验证。这揭示了一组从感知、长期记忆、评估和注意力系统中协调信息的区域。我们通过系统地损害生成全脑模型来确认我们结果的因果意义和稳健性。总体而言，该框架描述了人脑功能层次组织的复杂编排。